101 Reasons Digg is Burying Itself

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7 Ways To Get Front Paged

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So you want to know why your posts aren’t making Digg’s front page?

I’m guessing it’s because you wrote something original, it had quality, and you didn’t lie or put a number in the headline.

Content is King Crap

To be big on Digg, you should forget quality, and write something that is either half true or just make a list about something. Anything, it doesn’t matter. You’ll get a lot more Diggs if you just put 5 ways to do something than you will by just describing how to do one thing really well and forget about the other 4 ways.  Actually make it 7 or 10, those are apparently better than lists of 6 or 11, Never mind that you’ll have to come up with something brainless to fill the last slots, it’s more important to get the number right.

Forget Content It’s all About the Headline Anyway

You have to write a huge audacious headline. Just like this one, and then somehow stretch the post to the breaking point until you can sort of almost tie it in to the message as a whole.

In this case, it has nothing to do with anything but to prove the absurdity of it. I’m betting that I’ll get someone to Digg this and if it hits the front page, I’ll go drown myself in a bottle of scotch. Then again, since I’m peeing all over Digg here, AND have the audacity to write an original piece, that’s about a snowballs chance in hell anyway.

For Gods sake, DON’T Stay on Topic!

The worst thing for a Digg hungry Blogger is to be on topic and stay there.

If you have a focus and work to stick to your topic you risk having the same people - Your loyal readers - Digg it. And when these same people Digg your site too often, people scream vote gaming, which gets you buried in a heartbeat.

So in other words, you can’t write on the same topic and appeal to a core audience if they happen to be diggers too. Then you are out of the game. Best to write about something completely unrelated. Change your focus everyday, it’s not like you have to know what you are talking about when you write Diggable posts.

WTF is Going on Here?

You want as many WTF comments as possible. WTF is the Nobel Prize of Digg. The Accolade of accolades.

Good writing practise be damned! Write something controversial, let’s make some hair brained claims and as many slippery slope arguments as possible. Don’t worry about accuracy, the less of that commodity you have the more WTF’s you get and the better off you are on Digg.

Re-Hash, Steal, Cheat and Borrow

There is one more thing that works, which is what we see all the time, Re-hashing news that fit the profile to some extent. Have one big news story hit, and you’ll see 200 versions of it in submissions. Now it just a matter of who did the best job of stealing it, and had the best person submitting it for them. Again, screw copyrights, never mind academic honesty. This is Digg! We don’t deal with what’s right, only what gets a couple more WTF’s.

This is by far the best way to get a front page hit, submit news that you just steal off CNN or NY Times with some half baked comment of your own attached to it.

Original content sucks anyway. On Digg it’s all about reading the same news over and over, learning something new or actually hearing an original thought is just too confusing. Canned spam is what you want if you want to be popular.

The Stupefying Algorithm

Now, if you want to have some integrity left in your posts. You need the support of power users to get anywhere on Digg. In other words, you need someone with a fan base that Diggs their stuff. So how did they get there? By promoting as much crap as possible until they earn the right to post good stuff.

The more popular posts they have had in the past, the more chance of getting one to the front page again. In other words, a system that claims to work against vote gaming has bastardized itself to where vote gaming is the only thing that works.

Unless you want to follow the system above, you have to either become a power digger yourself, which means submitting as many posts following the above criteria as possible.  Or get one that has done the same before and now has the power user status behind them.

So the system is set up to become the tabloid of the social media. Unless you are tied in with a power user, you have to submit the “Obama gives birth to own head” post.

Power Diggers Control the only quality submissions, and they are of course tied in together in many ways. So you end up with the biggest vote gamers being supported by the system. (That sentence alone should get this post buried so fast my laptop will explode)

The normal users without connections fight the link bait game where selling your soul for a Digg hit is just about the only way to get noticed.

Just be prepared - when you succumb to the Digg game, your readers will end up being those that think Obama really is Usama’s son and that there really is 7 foolproof ways to make a million in 9 seconds.

The only good thing i see coming out of this is the supermarket tabloids starting to look respectable.

I’m sorry i have to run and read the latest shout about how Google and Microsoft have secretly banded together to take over the world.

See you tomorrow.